Birthday Planning for the Underaged

Daniel spent a portion of this evening wracking his brain trying to figure out how he could show proper gratitude to his friends, who gave him two Star Wars Lego sets for his birthday. "Star Wars" and "Legos," combined into a single phrase, captures the very highest of Daniel's and Ian's fun-hierarchies, respectively. And each one holds the other's favorite as a near-favorite - Ian loves Star Wars and Daniel really likes legos. This is probably the main reason they were more interested in staying home and playing than going anywhere today, and they really played for much or most of the day with the legos - both in terms of building them and the "Star-Wars-centric" dramatic play that followed with the resulting action-figures. They were like Sci-Fi nerds from M.I.T. (or any not-so-humanities-oriented university, which is most of them...) gleefully slogging through some 48-hour role-playing-game marathon. It was the perfect present, and Daniel was beside himself trying to figure out literally how to repay them for their breathtaking kindness.

So he walked around the house working it all out. He wrote a succint thank-you note on a scrap of paper. He wrote an invitation for them - I think he had Ian write out Happy Birthday on a piece of paper for him to follow, and then he copied Happy Birthday on a piece of paper of his own, except that each letter was spelled backwards, which would not be a problem in the Middle East... I think the "Happy Birthday" project was intended as an invitation, although his new best friends couldn't attend his upcoming party, which is why they sent the present to him ahead of time. On the same "Happy Birthday" composition, he also drew three birthday cakes. And he was fiercely trying to figure out what he could give to the boys. He was considering both items in toy stores and his own cache of toys, as candidates for some reciprocation-in-kind.

Finally I explained to him that he doesn't have to give them a present now - that one of the great things about friendship is that people keep giving each other things back and forth over their lives. Moreover, this was a birthday present, and so he would best reciprocate when time comes to get them a birthday present (which, I thought he realized, happened several months ago, when he had, in fact, given them a present). At that point, Daniel stopped in his tracks, looked very earnest, with a wrinkled brow and a pensive expression, and said with appropriate ardor: "Hmmm.... You're right." The problem was that he didn't quite connect the dots, in terms of their birthday having already come and gone and a present having been presented at the proper moment. So he immediately tried to think of what he could get them for a birthday present...

Finally, he started contemplating getting them the same present that they gave him, only he factored in the apparent assumption that he was somehow not big enough - or tall enough, as he focused on, perhaps as a synonym for big, or otherwise perhaps because of the height of this particular toy in Toys R Us... So this is the scenario he put together to make it possible for him to show his friends exactly the same generosity, while also addressing his real or perceived insufficiency in age, or height, to make the purchase itself at this point in his youth:

"When I'm tall enough to get a Lego Star Wars, can I get it and give it to them, before it's their birthday?"

(November 13, 2010)